I AWOKE ALONE.
Terrifyingly alone.
I searched first for Irma's voice, the last warning I'd heard.
She was gone.
Not silent.
Gone.
You know how some memory, some person, is a part of you even when you're not thinking? Something your mind can always conjure? Maybe it smells like the morning coffee you had first thing at work every morning, or it's a vivid taste like the cinnamon gum you chewed only when you were a kid, or a scent and sensation like a Teddy bear's faux fur you buried your face into at a toy store once, all those traces of memory that go back as far as you can remember.
Irma was like that and she was not here. She had left the room that was me.
So had the silver familiar. Yeah, I'd fought it from the first, resented its source and found its presence creepy. Not feeling it at all after several weeks was even creepier.
So what did I feel or sense now? First, I hoped my eyelids were shut because all I could see of my environment was that splotchy blackness behind your closed eyes in bed at night.
Second, I didn't seem to be floating but I was definitely horizontal. I broke into an icy sweat when I realized I wasn't inclined to move just as much as I wasn't inclined to open my eyes. Inquiring reporters want to know. For the first time in my remembered life, I didn't want to know. I knew I wouldn't like where the faintly reflecting glass door had taken me.
I so far gleaned that I lay flat, on my back, immobile-my most terrifying nightmare since I could remember nightmares-and I didn't feel anything but some level surface beneath me.
Wait. Not quite true. What lay beneath me was stone-hard but not cold, about the same temperature as my body, because I could barely sense it. A deep breath lifted my chest and shoulders against the faintest whisper of a barrier. Something was covering me.
Not clothes.
And not above the neck, so I wasn't a dead body in a morgue-yet.
I listened so intensely I thought my jaws would snap.
Finally, faint as a wisp of wind, I heard or felt motion around me, above me. And, worse than anything, the softest slithering sound below me.
My mind-fearful I'd been transported to the Karnak, whether by my mirror magic or even a physical method while unconscious-sensed more around me than the gigantic Egyptian bulk of the Strip hotel itself.
That was only a gaudy and deceptive gateway to an endless empire buried deep in the sands of time and space. So, with a child's exotic fears, my mind pictured giant cobras gathering here, slipping their faintly sheened coils along a stone floor, nearing, their small evil faces set like poisonous jewels in the broad, flared collars of their scales.
Every lurid film clich�� about ancient Egypt assembled on the black screen behind my eyes. I saw and imagined I heard the breathless beat of torch flames in the oxygen-starved environment of the ancient pyramid chambers.
I pictured painted eyes of graceful human forms watching me. I envisioned upright crocodiles marching along with slavering jaws among creatures with the kilted and collared bodies of human bronze gods surmounted by bird and animal and serpent heads clothed in the traditional cloth headdresses.
I took another breath. I could feel and needed to see. Anything was better than six-foot-tall swaying cobras, even mysteriously muzzled royal hyenas I could no longer sense anywhere. Surely they'd be laughing if they were still present. I opened my eyes.
And looked right up into my worst nightmare.
I was indeed lying flat on my back, so I could only look up. I saw a ceiling where all the figures from my imagined tomb frieze floated at crazy right angles to each other. Obscuring most of the paintings was a large overhead lamp, its light focused tightly downward but muted to an eerie glow otherwise, as at a dentist's office.
Figures were indeed gathered around me-pale, mouthless, hairless figures like the mannequins in an expensive, avant-garde department store, with huge black liquid eyes. Three stood on either side of me, motionless.
My fear tripled. I was indeed held helpless in the alien spaceship of my nightmares, or perhaps of my oldest, most buried memories, surrounded by vague silent forms watching me as if I were a bug pinned to a dissecting table. Did they still have those awful high school biology classes where kids had to cut up worms and frogs? The memory made my skin crawl.
This recurrent nightmare of mine preceded that Millennium Revelation year of 2000-2001. I knew I was again Young Delilah, eleven or so. And so scared. So alone. And I knew, even more than before, because Real Delilah was somewhere in here with me, this was going to hurt me, badly. Again.
People think kids don't know what's coming when they lose complete power over themselves, like in a dentist's chair or on a doctor's examination table. Or an autopsy table. But they do, which is why Real Delilah had demanded dentists work with her phobias and let her sit up, why she'd gone to underground clinics for birth control pills to avoid the horizontal horrors of the ob/gyn's sinister stirrup-equipped table, the surety of invasion and hurtful, insensitive intimacy.
Adults think kids are gullible when we're only innocent.
And now I sense myself as a split personality: a kid/ adult imprisoned in my past/present and maybe about to lose it all, including my mind.
Okay, Delilah, hang on!
I had that bracing thought just in time. Or was I no longer "I," Delilah, but Lilith on an autopsy table in a new nightmare? An instant after I felt a pain so sharp and yet both alien and familiar I couldn't tell where on my body it had occurred, much less what. I sucked in a monstrous breath.